


the risk of absence

by orphan_account



Series: backs to the wall 'verse [2]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 06:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i> To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.</i> </p><p>Mikasa thinks about losing her heart, by choice or design, and realizes she has no heart to spare.</p><p>(in the same 'verse as <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1029274/chapters/2050084">backs to the wall</a>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the risk of absence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



_“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” -- The Little Prince_

 

Sasha doesn’t _haunt_ Mikasa. To say that would be ridiculous. But Mikasa can’t get her out of her head. She wakes up and Sasha’s sweatshirt is draped over the foot of her bed, she goes to make breakfast, and Sasha’s left the coffeemaker on from three days ago, she goes to class and her jacket smells like Sasha, like blueberries and coffee. After class she goes back to her apartment to change it out, but all her clothes smell like Sasha. They’ve started sharing the closet, and Sasha keeps little packets of dried out petals in the pockets of some of her clothes.

That’s when the panic sets in, when she drops heavily onto the edge of her bed, and lets her head fall. She doesn’t really know when they became so tied to each other, when Sasha’s life became so inextricable from hers. She’s all over everything -- the kitchen, the bedroom, her slippers are by the bathroom door, her pajamas are in the hamper. And it’s not that she’s here, that she’s been creeping deep into Mikasa’s life and her heart for the last eight months.

It’s that she could leave.

She makes herself think those words, makes her self face it, makes her self turn it over and understand her panic so she can break it apart.

It grows instead.A horrible choking feeling that starts in her lungs and works its way up to her throat. She should have seen this coming. And she had from the moment she’d seen the purpling bruise around Sasha’s eye, and all through her enthusiastic account of punching a mugger in the face. She hadn’t said anything -- a room full of people really wasn’t the place to ask why Sasha hadn’t...hadn’t what? Protected herself? She had and really well. She’d gotten away with nothing but a bruise.

Mikasa can see her automated response unfolded over the last few days -- the distance, the quiet, the slow shuttering of her heart. _I have no heart to spare._ She’d whispered it to herself every night before she’d gone to sleep as a child, all through middle school, through high school. There were four people allowed in her heart, and she lived with three of them.

She could track the slow opening of her heart, first with Hanji and Petra, and then the slow trickle of her classmates at university, her gym mates at the MMA facility she attended with Petra, then Sasha. Sasha was the most terrifying, the one who’d worked hardest at opening her up, who’d burrowed her way the deepest. And Mikasa thinks about what that will feel like, having her torn out by fate or design, all the different bloody pieces she’d be left with, all the things she’d have to suture back together, all the walls she would have to rebuild.

“I can’t,” she says to herself and hates the way her voice trembles, the way it sounds hoarse as if she’s on the verge of crying.

 _I have no heart to spare._ Not for this. Never for this.

 

Mikasa picks up and leaves without telling anyone.

She just needs time. That’s what she tells herself when she stuffs clothes into a duffel bag, when she stops in front of the whiteboard and stares at Sasha’s message.

_Working late shift tonight. See you in the morning. ps: don’t wait up!_

She should write something, should say ‘see you whenever’. Something so that Sasha doesn’t freak out. But she opens the door and slings her duffle bag across her chest, and doesn’t leave a message at all.

Karla is surprised to see her when she pulls in at two in the morning, but she doesn’t say anything, just pulls her into the house and puts on tea.

 

The worried texts start at four. She feels every one, like a dint in her armor, a small pebble joined by another pebble and then another and another, all hitting the wall she’s built for herself. She puts her arm over her eyes, but she won’t put the phone on silent, and she won’t pick up and she won’t respond.

Eren calls the next morning, and that phone call she takes.

“It’s just a few days,” she says, and her voice is still a little hoarse.

She can hear his weighty silence on the other end. “Mikasa -- Sasha’s really worried.”

“I’m...I’m fine.”

“So call her. Tell her,” Eren says.

She hangs up.

 

She’s bracing herself. She can tell, in a weird distant kind of way what she’s doing. Setting up the pain for now instead of later. Cauterizing the wound, sealing away the pain. It’s too cold to work in the garden, too cold to do anything that might take her mind off Sasha. She can’t even go to the gym. All she thinks the first time she goes is Sasha coming to cheer her during one of her fights, Sasha asking to learn, Sasha knocking her off her feet, knocking the breath out of her.

 _Stop_ , she thinks to herself and slams the locker door shut. _Stopstopstopstop_.

But she can’t. She thinks about going back home at the end of the week -- and she doesn’t really know when that happened, when the apartment went from being ‘the apartment’ to ‘home’ -- of all of Sasha’s things gone, of the message board wiped clean, of her leaving in a rage over what Mikasa’s done. She thinks about having to live with the smell of blueberries and whatever Sasha stuffs in those packets lingering for weeks after she’s cleared out.

But then she thinks about losing her, of letting whatever this is get bigger and better and more, and then having it ripped out of her.

 _This way is better_ , she thinks to herself.

 

She goes back at the end of the week. By then her phone is silent. No one calls. No one texts. She can feel its silence like a space in the car. The slow trudge up the stairs feels like hauling up a rock. She can’t remember if she left the heat on, or the lights, or anything.

The living room light is on.

Sasha is sitting on the couch, and she rises to her feet when Mikasa walks in. Mikasa pauses for just a second before she drops her duffle bag and reaches for the buttons on her coat.

“What are you doing here?”

Her heart thuds painfully in her chest.

Sasha frowns. “What am I doing here? Are you serious?”

Mikasa makes her face stay straight, makes her body stay still. She missed her, missed her voice, and her warmth, and sleeping with her head on her shoulder.

“My girlfriend up and disappeared. She wouldn’t respond to my phone calls or my texts. She didn’t even leave me a _message on the fucking white board_.” She’s shaking by the last of it, her hands clenched into fists.

Mikasa doesn’t say anything, just looks away from her and loosens the scarf around her neck. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. She was supposed to have left -- that’s what people did. They left, quietly, in the night, and Mikasa was always left alone, always the only one who felt anything, the only one who cared. It was Mikasa who always had to pick up the fractured pieces of herself, to piece them back together into a thicker stronger wall.

“What do you want?” she makes herself say and can see the way Sasha flinches back from her, from the sound in her voice.

“ _Want_?” And maybe this is worse, the way her voice drops to a whisper. “I want to know what happened that you bolted in the night? People don’t do that to each other.”

“I just. I just had to go.”

This is supposed to be easier. She knows better. Should know better. _I have no heart to spare._ No room to give. There’s no place for other things to take root and grow.

“That’s...it? You had to go?” Sasha throws her arms up in the air. “What if I had just _gone_?”

Mikasa’s heart seizes. _Why haven’t you?_

“If you want to go,” Mikasa says, and her voice is even, hard. “Then go. I won’t stop you.”

And then she turns around and she slams out the door. She doesn’t realize she’s made it back to her car until she turns the key in the ignition. She makes herself breathe, makes her grip loosen on the steering wheel, puts her mind on lock. She knows what she’s doing doesn’t make sense, even as a tactical move, because this isn’t ripping off the bandage a few weeks early, this is digging into the wound. She’s making it worse, not better, for both of them

In too many ways it feels like a last desperate stand with all the messiness and irrationality involved. It’s the last stand for the wall around her heart, her last chance to patch it up and fortify it, her last chance to uproot anything that grows too deep and too strong.

She could go up and apologize and fix it.

Instead, she pulls out of the parking lot.

She spends three hours at the gym pounding her fists into a punching bag. She doesn’t realize how long its been until someone comes in and warns for lights out. For a minute she considers calling Eren and staying at his place. Calling anyone and staying at their place so she doesn’t have to face an empty apartment.

The apartment is dead quiet when she gets back. The lights are off, and even the space heater doesn’t hum. She sheds her coat in the foyer, kicks off her boots, drapes her scarf over the back of a chair. The shower water is scalding hot but she doesn’t fix it. She’s too tired. By the time she gets out of the shower she isn’t crying, but it’s because she feels burnt out. Her eyes sting and her chest feels like there’s something terrible and heavy pressing against it. She doesn’t feel like she’s ripped the bandaid off, she feels as if she’s tried to uproot something huge and its left its mark on her.

She doesn't turn the light on when she walks into her bedroom, just shuffles out of her slippers, drops the towel around her neck into the hamper, and makes her way to the bed.

Sasha is in the bed.

Mikasa pauses, terrified, not understanding.

_She didn't leave._

She's wearing pajamas now -- some tshirt Mikasa got her months ago and a pair of flannel pants she'd claimed when she first started spending the night. She's curled into a ball, a book laid out by her as if she fell asleep reading, fell asleep waiting for her. It's not that something in Mikasa breaks; it takes root and takes root fast and hard. She can feel it painfully real in her chest, spreading to her lungs. Sasha's become part of the wall around her heart and she doesn't know how to tear her out. She doesn't know how to protect herself against the ache in her chest, part pain part relief part something else altogether. She doesn't know when - if - _when_ she loses her what she'll do.

_I have no heart to spare._

She has no pieces left to bury, none to give away. She can’t afford the risk.

“Mikasa?”

She pulls in a shuddering breath. Sasha doesn't say anything, doesn't mention the tears rolling down her cheeks. She just puts her hands around Mikasa's and pulls her into bed.

“You didn't leave.”

“I'm not leaving,” Sasha says, and tucks Mikasa's head under her chin.

“You didn't leave,” she repeats, voice hoarser and buries her face against Sasha's chest.

Sasha pulls away, fingers tangled in Mikasa’s hair, and looks at her, eyes roaming over her face. Mikasa makes herself not look away, can’t help lifting a hand and brushing her fingers over the faded bruise. Sasha frowns, folds her hand over Mikasa’s, and then her expression clears.

“I promise,” she says, “that I am not leaving you.”

“You don’t--”

“I do,” Sasha interrupts and smiles, something small and secret. “I do know.” She lays a hand over Mikasa’s cheek.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Mikasa says. But she wants to believe, she wants to believe so hard that Sasha is here to say, that nothing is going to take her from her, that this is whole and lasting and untouchable.

 _Nothing’s untouchable_ , she thinks when Sasha pulls her back into her arms. But how much, she wonders, would she risk, should she risk, for this? For them? For Sasha smiling next to her in the morning, for late nights in the library with her and lazy Sundays and two a.m. phone calls about nothing and everything.

As much as Sasha was willing to risk.

“I won’t leave again,” Mikasa says later, whispers it into Sasha’s shoulder, like a promise to herself.

 

The morning is...quiet. Fragile. They stare at each other for long minutes when they wake up. Mikasa is too tired to feel panicked, to rested to indulge herself. It’s worth the risk, she thinks, reaching for Sasha, worth scrounging up pieces just for her, worth opening up her heart. This is worth everything she thinks, kissing Sasha, shimmying out of her pajama pants, running her fingers over her ribs.

This, the sound of their stuttered breathing, the tangle of their limbs, the way Sasha’s fingers twist in the sheets, the way Mikasa fits her hands over hers, Sasha’s breath puffing over her shoulder. And it’s worth the after, the soft sighs, and their bodies fitting together, tired and peaceful. Worth the whispers, Sasha’s fingers tracing lines down her arm, the warmth bubbling up in her chest.

“I’m scared,” she says later, staring out the window. Sasha’s head is in her lap, as if she’s half dozing half awake.

For a moment Mikasa doesn’t think she’ll say anything back. But then she opens her eyes. “It’s scary,” she says, sitting up. “But we have each other. Right?”

And Mikasa lets out a breath, presses her face against Sasha’s shoulder. “Yes,” she says. “We have each other.”

 


End file.
